The Other Side

You could have been a stranger, lying there, livery and inert. Yet, I know it was you; almost everything about you was familiar; known. The frame of you was the same: strong features, high forehead, wise eyes and gentle gaze; wide shoulders always ready to carry my world, but your long arms always loving, rested empty, listlessly, at your skeletal sides and your jaundiced skin hung on your bones, your face, drawn and gaunt, bearing the mask of an insidious cancer subduing its host. Your dark hair, always so perfectly slicked back – regal and organized, just like you – was now out of order; a mess of unwashed, matted black threads, riotous against the white, hospital linen. Your dignity seemed tangled somewhere between it and the mass of tubes supporting your breathing and measuring your vital signs; not gone yet, just shifting slowly somehow from the dignity of living to the indignity of dying.

I watched you; breathless with rising grief. Your eyes flitted open and then closed, then open again as you recognized me, tried to reach for me and then stopped, too weak to take the thought any further. Or was your hesitation something else? I know you wanted to speak – your expressive hands always rhymed with your words whenever you had something to say, but now, only your hands were moving as your mouth soundlessly sucked at the ventilation, like a fish out of water, oppressed by air that had no way of giving it the life-sustaining oxygen it held; but could not share. As you struggled for speech, the eloquence I had known you for dried up and hung in a wordless silence of anguish and the anticipation of death. How would you put into words what you knew was coming – you were leaving, I, staying – how would you shape it; give it form I could understand? You were always the teacher; the one who showed me how to see what I couldn’t grasp myself. How would you tell me to live without you? If you had spoken, what would you have said?

At first, I told myself you would have told me to stand closer; to listen carefully. And in your deep voice with its tangible compassion you would have told me how much you would miss our talks, those times when you listened to the vibrant speech of a daughter loving life under the careful gaze of a father who gave her the freedom to colour life in her own way. When I stood at your bedside searching for the familiar and the known in the face of all this unknown, all this dread, I am sure – I think I am sure - you would have told me not to run from fear, but to face it dead on right there at your side. You would have told me I would have to walk the road ahead alone, and you would have charged me to remember what you had spent a lifetime teaching me: embrace life; face your fears and love with wild abandon. You would have challenged me to see the good in the bad and to stop whining over things I couldn’t control. You weren’t afraid of honesty – you were as transparent as morning dew on spider-webs; suspended there in the warming light for all to see. What you said in the way you lived your brief life was how much you loved me and wanted the best for me. Yet now, the glistening dew of your unclouded loyalty was dispersing in your strange, somber silence; not because you couldn’t speak, but because the deathly silence coupled with your agitation was speaking something I began to hear and did not want to.

I kept telling myself what I wanted to hear, things you’d said so many times before that I could say them back to you without thinking. I knew you, I thought I understood your perspective, but now, on the threshold of death I didn’t know you at all. As you prepared to abandon life, you became a stranger; something unfamiliar, a fleeting shadow I could not clasp nor hold on to. What was it you were trying to say – to make me see?

I tried to see it your way, I truly did, but there was a default setting of utter trust and a narrative of care that bent my imagination to my own perspective because I was comfortable with the muscle memory of our relationship – it had always been this way; why was I doubting it now? Because when you finally did speak, it wasn’t to say my name or to call me closer. The sound at first was hazy and distant and could have been mistaken for the ragged breaths you were desperately drawing in in an attempt to extract oxygen from pneumonia riddled lungs – leukemia doesn’t kill you; secondary infections do that. When the word finally came out, just loud enough for me to hear it, it wasn’t to reassure me or draw me in to tell me you love me, one last time. You simply said, “Nurse.”

At first I thought I had misheard, and then your hands, those beautiful, once strong hands, started to move again, trying to speak what you were struggling to say. The sight of the struggle was enough to make me turn and go on some kind of mechanical search for a nurse to come to your aid. At the sound of my own footfall, away from you, tears prickled behind my burning eyes and the sound of my heart beating was muffled like a distant, thudding base in my ears which were hearing something unfamiliar – a new sound that I couldn’t amplify with concrete thoughts to tell me what it was that you needed me to hear; to see. I found the nurse and we walked in silence back to where you lay dying. As she fluffed your pillows and tried to make you comfortable, I watched helplessly, my fingers twitching in response to her helping hands – I so wanted those hands to be mine. But for the first time in my life there was a palpable paralysis between us as my arms stayed hanging uselessly by my side; like your arms lay uselessly by yours.

The muffled words you spoke to the nurse were inaudible to me, but I understood them in her gaze. As one who has, many times, heard the words of the dying and translated them into wishes, she had heard what you wanted to say voiced in your agitation. Her gaze told me that you were asking me to leave.

Rooted to my place on the clinically clean, cold floor, I felt the chill of impending loss and walked towards it instead of away from it. I extended my hand to hold yours but you waved it away and looked at me one last time. That look in your beautiful, watery blue eyes told me something new, and the ‘I love you, Daddy’ desperate to leave my lips and race through the air to your failing body stopped; hovered and then died away. Because somehow I knew that you were seeing me in a new way. You were looking at me while staring death in the face. And if I’m honest, I was looking at you while staring life – without you – in the face. And as we stared at each other in this stand-off of anticipated loss; this impasse of changing perspectives, both of us somehow knew that words could not express it and that nothing more could be said.

I stood, motionless, waiting for it to come to me – the complete understanding I was looking for but hadn’t been able to grasp. And slowly, a realisation began to dawn on me as the monitor beeped in time with my dissipating confusion; rising: falling; rising again.

And finally it came to me.

I saw it – your perspective. I heard it - what you wanted to say to me. You didn’t need me to tell you, “I love you.” You didn’t need me to tell you what you already knew; you didn’t need me to reassure you and comfort you.

You wanted; no, you needed me to leave.

You needed me to remember life and living.

Not death and dying.

You needed me to walk away from you as the life drained out of you because your love for me demanded it of you. Denying me the scrutiny of Death as it came for you; you sacrificed your own need for comfort to leave me, instead, your perspective: what it truly means to look at one you love and leave them the grace of the memory of living, the proof of a life once lived.

As surely as I saw it, I couldn’t move. The nurse, honouring your dying wish and your profound and agonizing gift to your daughter, touched my shoulder, breaking through my understanding and nudging me gently towards the door as I looked away from you for the last time.

And finally, left alone to usher in death, you were at peace. Turning my gaze away from a morbid spectacle you had no desire for me to see, I saw what you had seen all along - the side of a story that you died to tell.

In memory of my father, Derek Brady 1935 - 1986